Jamie Foxx Is "Aggresively Pursuing" A 'Spawn' Reboot

Usually when an actor says he's interested in a role, it's little more than talk. As a rule, few actors are ever going to turn town a role via an interview, and even when they specify something they want to play, that doesn't mean it is anywhere close to happening.

But when an actor who is also a producer says he's "aggressively pursuing" a role, that's different. That's how Jamie Foxx talked about the comic book character Spawn in an interview at Comic Con. The character is a soldier murdered and condemned to hell, who is able to return to Earth as a "hellspawn," a role against which he ultimately rebels. The character anchored a 1997 film starring Michael Jai White — the first major film featuring a black superhero as the lead — but creator Todd McFarlane wants to reboot Spawn in a new movie form.

Put Foxx's comment together with a past tease from McFarlane about having an Oscar-winning actor attached to the role for a reboot, and a picture starts to form.

Movies.com talked to Foxx at Comic Con, thanks to the fact that Foxx is playing Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, out next year. Asked about other roles Foxx wants, he said,

Spawn is one, yeah. And Mike Tyson. Those are two roles I would just love to do. I'm aggressively pursuing them.

McFarlane has been talking about rebooting Spawn for years. The mid-'90s movie adaptation hit a few years before the current wave of superhero films really began,  and McFarlane has said he wants the new version to be more harsh and gritty, with an R rating.

Earlier this year McFarlane told MTV,

I continue writing pages here and there. I have a guy waiting in the sidelines, an Academy Award-winning actor. Every three weeks he's on the phone going, 'Todd, where's the script? Todd, where's the script?' I can't say who it is. You could [narrow it down]. He came out to the office. He gave me his pitch, and I gave him mine. The pitch I gave was that we could do ten of these for the next ten years and he wouldn't have to be 22 for the rest of his life.

It's easy to assume now that the actor in question is Foxx. Whether he'll be able to make the film happen is another question, but if The Amazing Spider-Man 2 does well and people respond to his role as Electro, that could make things easier. Meanwhile, more details about Foxx's possible turn as Mike Tyson would be great to get as well. Even Tyson wants that to happen (or did back in 2009), but Foxx has been linked to the role for years with no real movement.